"Won't someone think of the trees!"

I'm going to drop the Day X prefixes at the beginning of these posts. They are a handy way of keeping these chronicles in order, but this project is going to last until some time in December and I'm not going to be reporting on every single day of action.

On Friday morning, not a whole lot of work was done. Someone dropped off a big roll of felt and a pallette of 2x4's and a bunch of trees were wrapped and protected.



I asked one of the workers why the trees were being wrapped and he went on a little mini-rant about how trees are more important than people to the city and that if we kill a tree, everybody freaks out, but if we kill a person nobody cares. It was done in that half-humourous half-aggressive way that construction workers always seem to have to behave. I said that that was as it should be, that there were too many people and not enough trees and he called me Mr. Schnitzel. When I asked him to repeat himself, as I didn't get what he was talking about, he said "you know, the guy who was worse than Hitler." "Do you mean Schindler?" "Yes, him!"

The inspector approached us at this point and the workers teased him about arriving late. I asked him about the trees. The reason I kept pressing about the trees is that they had already finished digging up the sidewalks next to the trees, so it seemed a bit late to be wrapping them up in protective 2x4's. The inspector admitted that they were supposed to have protected them at the beginning and that they had "gotten a reminder from the city".

The conversation then degenerated into complaining about the youth of today. This was a subject that we could all agree on, how lame they are. According to the workers, there are something around 6,000 skilled construction jobs available right now in Quebec and nobody to fill them. Considering that Quebec does have a pretty good trades education program and that those jobs are pretty secure and well-paying, it does seem strange that more young people aren't going in to fill the ranks. I'm sure it's not quit as simple as that, as there is probably a lot of union bullshit to go through. Their theory is that the kids just want to stay at home and play video games.

The final enticing thing I learned was that the original sewer pipe is made up of brick! I really hope that's the case and that we'll get to see it. Even sweeter would be some kind of souvenire, like an old plaque or something.

Sadly, as I was heading out to work this morning, I saw that one tree made the cut.



Looks perfectly healthy to me. I really would love to see the criteria for why a tree gets chopped down.